Category Archives: Coercive early AI

The proof that newspapers’ reader-commenters are data-collection gold is in site-owners’ tightening restrictions; attempts to control the historical record; and seizing gifts to the commons for themselves

. Big Data collection, Business models for publishing, Coercive early AI, Keiretsu-cooperative, The seasons . , , , ,
The tiger mural is a reminder that our most ordinary actions, from shopping to pumping fuel ( above and below ) are being included in data-gathering for AI everywhere. In an old Chinese philosophical text, tigers spy with ‘sharp eyes’ — the official name of China’s nationwide surveillance system

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The Wikipedia uses this painting by Hieronymus Bosch to illustrate its explanation of misdirection. Frogs leaping from the mouth of the victim having his pocket picked by the conjurer’s accomplice mock his foolishness

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Hello froggy.

Happy New Year!

Before I get to frog ponds — or another way to think of comments sections of newspapers and other media sites — let’s think about where we are on this road to a world run on AI. What’s being done to commenters couldn’t be more emblematic.

No I’m not addressing you as a twitchy amphibian to be rude. I’m a frog too. We all are. Frogs clueless for the most part about the heat being turned up under this pot of water we’ve been put in ever so gently, as the dial twists by infinitesimal degrees. Or not so oblivious, but lying to ourselves about what is happening because truth is frightening when we don’t know how to defend ourselves against its implications.

What truth is that? you ask. This: in digital technology’s reshaping of society, we have gone far beyond the surveillance business model (or ‘surveillance capitalism’ if you are politically-minded) to losing our human agency — which is, being deprived of our ability to act on our intentions, or do freely what we reasonably expect to be able to. Or did.

Pay attention to what the most objective leading scientists are saying. Not the elite compromised by still working in or closely connected to technology giants, investors and startups. Not anyone taking Big Tech’s coin in research funding at their universities — the subject of a recent report in the Washington Post — unless they are as honest as the Belgian physicist Bob Coecke. He taught at Oxford for over twenty years and lately, has been doing all he can for emergency public education. In an interview with a Guardian journalist published two weeks ago he said, too bluntly for delicate ears:

‘Think about AI. Think about how the world is getting fucked up now. Billion-dollar companies are in charge of a revolution that could control the world and nobody understands what they are doing.’

Note his use of the present tense, dear froggy. Treat as singing with forked tongues the chorus of alarmism about AI dangers from too many sci-tech stars. Note that their warnings are focused on the future — with no mention of damage being done by AI in the present, in which fortunes are being made by some of those alarmists as they themselves exploit the all-invading technology (last mentioned in a post here in June.)

It’s hard to shake off the impression that the persistent future-focus is being used exactly like the ancient magician’s art of theatrical misdirection. A stream of deceptive patter from the conjurer concentrates on what he wants the audience to look at while he grabs the diversion to play his tricks and pull off his stunts.   

How do you demonstrate that we are losing human agency? O froggy, o froggy, the proof that we’re frogs set for boiling is all around us in the trivia of daily life. It looks boring beside the futurist-conjurers’ high-flown speculations about AI becoming ‘conscious,’ and their arguments about what that what would mean. 

You can trace an arc of horror from a New York Times exposé five years ago to a recent leak about Google’s objective in its nonstop data collection on, and analysis of us as individuals. In 2019 Kashmir Hill, a NYT reporter, discovered that Sifted, a company specialising in data-gathering, was a top purveyor of detailed personal profiles of consumers that other companies buy to decide on discriminatory treatment. How long you are kept on hold  as you wait for customer support. Or when you have to return a defective product you have bought, make that task easy, arduous or impossible. 

This is all done automatically by software, early AI or machine intelligence, based on your very personal Sifted profiling and categorisation, which can include — as the NYT journalist discovered — ten years of comments that you posted on some website. Rating like this could account for some cases in a Guardian report on 19 December about the frantic struggles of UK telecommunications customers attempting to cancel broadband contracts. One said that he could not get anyone to help him on his telecoms company’s web chat service ‘after leaving it open all day for two consecutive days,’ — after which he spent hours on hold seeking help by telephone, during which he was disconnected four times.

Who could expect any of this to get better after considering the implications of these Daily Mail gleanings from documents presented at a recent internal conference at Google describing ‘the tech giant’s plan to create an artificial intelligence designed to become its users’ “Life Story Teller”’ — software anyone could open for the first time and discover that ‘“it already knows everything about your life.’’’

As people paying attention know by now, dear froggy, the technologists say that they are only following digital technology where it is leading us unavoidably. Before the wide public debate that this rationalisation needs — urgently, members of the public have to open their eyes wide to their frogs-in-pot predicament.

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My own enlightenment came from thinking about roughly a decade of reading and commenting on the website of the Financial Times, a newspaper to which I have had fond, work-related ties going back to three weeks before I turned twenty-one, a whole geological era ago. I mention this because feeling the temperature go up in the frog water on that site, and realising that commenter-frogs are no longer in a pond but a confining pot — thanks to sweeping changes in the online FT’s management practices — is especially unnerving for those of us who knew the paper in its still recent, pre-digital past.

There was of course no glimmer, in that past, of anything like the proposal related to this post-Gutenberg site’s launch in 2011 — a description of a new economic structure or ‘business model’ for publishing I called a keiretsu-cooperative, which placed reader-commenters at its core. I saw a chance for a sort of symphysis: commenters and publishers evolving, growing and prospering together — after an experimental phase in which the idea was debugged and refined.

In spite of the annoyance of trigger-happy site moderators, the first few years of media commenting sites, from approximately the mid-noughties, were glorious fun. Very happy frog ponds. On the websites where I tried out commenting — or unmediated publishing — it was startling to see readers hopping in and out at any hour of day or night, frequently posting links to their personal blogs and websites. We started our own, separate conversations in those places. Some of us went on to exchange news about our families as a matter of course.

The Financial Times site was not one of my early commenting ponds. Perhaps because it was already behind a paywall in 2016, and because a large proportion of its readers’ subscriptions are paid for by their expense accounts, the conversations there are less relaxed — if more reliably intelligent. But it was enough like the sites where I learnt how commenting works that I have been alarmed by registering signs of readers being treated over the years less like cherished visitors and more and more like data-collection objects (or dupes): instances adding up to froggy water warming up steadily but barely noticeably.

Signs such as these:

— Blocking or interfering with downloading and saving articles and comments — that is, readers’ ability to take delivery of what they have paid for.

This includes introducing barriers to commenters’ ability to save their own published comments and the rest of the commenter thread — the context in which they were made.

It used to be possible to save any article with its entire comment thread in a single sequence of clicks. That is now only a sad memory.

— Rearranging the order in which comments were actually posted in thread-saves, along with severely restricting the number of comments downloadable in a single cut-and-paste exercise. This is not merely frustrating but distorts the historical record, which matters to those of us — including scholars — who study for instance, the ebb and flow of sentiment on particular topics in the threads. Declarations of support for positions that oppose the paper’s politics can simply be eliminated from comment-rations.

— Stamping with an FT.com ownership (copyright) notice any saved comment contributed to the commons by readers writing to and for each other, a valuable public resource — even though we legally own the copyright to our own sentences and paragraphs.

— Discouraging commenters from getting to know each other.

In the first of the series of redesigns of FT.com witnessed by me since 2016 — including changes in the management of the site and policies affecting reader-commenters — subscribers stopped receiving detailed email notifications of replies to our comments as well as of any new comment in a thread if we had opted to be sent these. The e-notices had until then been delivered with copies of all the sentences to which a fellow-reader was responding; the whole text of any reply, as well as the screen name of the responder. 

All these added immensely to the joys of commenting, especially for anyone like me far less interested in how many replies or recommendations my comments earn than in the screen identity of the recommender. In experiences on other sites, some responses were the start of exceptionally rewarding friendships. Being able to judge how active a thread was from new post alerts helped to decide timing for adding contributions to discussions or just larking around. The alerts often cheered up my email inbox on days when it was clogged with depressing subjects.  

Since the policy shift, all we receive is a flag about a reply from a particular screen name. Nothing more. Another alteration introduced in those early years removed the ability to address a single comment to several screen names in a thread. 

Why did the site managers do this? As they do not answer questions about their motives, you have to guess for yourself. Far from encouraging friendships and symphysis, the site operators are seemingly worried about the possibility of collective action by readers in any policy disagreement with management. 

The overriding motive for switching to bare-bones email notices was obvious: to force commenters to return to the site as often as possible — to increase the click count used to attract advertisers, and to allow data collection. As almost everyone now knows, each twitch of our cursors, every placement of our clicks and even clues to our changing moods are being recorded and added to our profiles. Sparing us the need to return and log in again would mean giving up chances to fatten these data hoards.  

— Blocking site visitors who pay to attend forums and other online events from using the privacy-preserving Safari browser to participate, and insisting that they use Chrome.

This happened to me after I had bought my ticket for one event. It took a time-wasting appeal to upper management to get my money back.

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Because I put commenters at front and centre stage in my discussion brief for the Oxford Internet Institute in 2010, I have not been surprised to find comments being treated like precious metals — even if I couldn’t have guessed that this would have anything to do with data gathering for detailed profiling of citizens. Grist for the LLMs that are the mills of AI.

If further confirmation of the soaring value of the pearls of wisdom or pigeon-droppings in readers’ contributions were needed, it could be in a report last month that Chinese authorities are stigmatizing as mentally ill website visitors who read comments but seldom or never write any. Not altogether a shock, if true, when you consider that the Chinese have always had their own ways of going about compelling cooperation, and their AI mills are no less avid for everyone’s thoughts and feelings. It looks as if someone ordained that the psychological profiles of refuseniks must not be permitted to have holes. 

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I posted a comment on FT.com last summer about my fear that we are on our way to a hot, wet extinction by bain-marie beneath an article about AI. A reader using @Useparagraphsplease for a screen ID was delighted to remind me that in the famous experiment my metaphor came from, all the frogs were able to escape alive and unhurt. 

But froggy dear, that took awareness and determined preventative action, which is my dearest hope for our species at the start of a new year.

Love,

p-G

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Note: Readers of this post who feel that any criticism in it is unfair or inaccurate are invited to leave a comment (which will not be published until after its spambot check). Or, write to me directly at postgutenberg[at]gmail.com. 

Tech power has gone bully-boy, part 3: Gen Z knows that apps are feeding into early command-and-control AI. It must stop feeling powerless and act

. Big Data collection, Coercive early AI, Commercial surveillance, Regulation of Big Tech, Surveillance business model, Surveillance capitalism, Take Back Your Data movement . , , , , , , ,

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In the montage above, R: one of many British child-soldiers who lied about being old enough to join the fighting in World War I. L: the face of today’s enemy, for anyone young and protective, could be a seemingly harmless, data-siphoning app

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[ Part 1 and Part 2 ]

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[ This post — delayed by unwanted adventures beginning in February that scrambled all plans and routines — is being published outside post-Gutenberg’s paywall with the hope that ‘influencers,’ especially those in Generation Z, will read and discuss it. 

For any subject in dire need of public understanding, there may never have been as wide a gap between what technologists and scientists know, compared to even highly educated non-experts, as in prospectively all-transformative artificial intelligence. 

The effects of public incomprehension, here, will be grave. Where we need vigorous opposition all we have is inaction. A deadly paralysis.

The finest tech and science brains struggling yet failing to enlighten us fear that it will take a calamity to shock us out of our resistance to paying attention. As tricky as the public education task was for them in explaining viruses and vaccines during the COVID pandemic, this is so much harder. 

How, for instance, do you demonstrate to someone uninterested in technology the implications of AI already revealing a capacity for complex practical judgment in answering a question about precisely how — and why — it would go about stacking a set of objects including nine eggs, a book, a laptop, a bottle and a nail ‘in a stable manner’? The significance of a report about this— ‘Proof of AI coming alive? Microsoft says its GPT-4 software is already “showing signs of human reasoning”’ — is not easily absorbed by the likes of a commenter on one London-based news site last month for whom this spring’s AI uproar is a silly fuss about progress in auto-complete word processing.

Instead of thinking about the meaning of Microsoft’s alert about GPT-4’s upskilling, too many of us would prefer to zone out and into a video clip that is undeniably delicious — recording a 1970 meeting of the Monty Python Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Things. Enjoy the laugh, o reader, if you watch or re-watch it, but then you must return to trying to understand what we must all keep trying to understand better, and assist with preventative measures. ]

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The rule is the same for wildland firefighting as for a kitchen blaze. First, cut the fire off from its source of fuel. Smother it if you can to deprive it of oxygen. Whether in chaparral or woodland, you’ll want to clear a fire break, deploying muscle power or bulldozers to rip out parched greenery all the way down to bare earth. You could be a battalion chief in CAL Fire, California’s stellar firefighting army, and the rule for the order of business would not change — even if your range of experience and excellent judgment mean that you are routinely invited to Sacramento for consultations on state-wide planning for cataclysmic firestorms.

However small and insignificant it might look, the fire burning this minute is where you have got to focus. 

From this angle of approach — nip horror in the bud — there’s a curious back-to-frontness about the sudden explosion in debating and bell-ringing about our AI-enslaved future without any mention of, or pointers to, developments in the present leading us to it in plain sight. 

Worse, some of the people you might expect to be concentrating on stamping out the digital equivalent of feeder-wildfires are actually igniting them — even as they issue one public caution after another about, metaphorically speaking, the whole globe burning unless ‘regulators’ step in like superheroes to save us.

What would digital equivalents of feeder-conflagrations be?

Systems for collecting personal data about you 24 hours a day, starting with those apps you unthinkingly install on your phone, you will answer — if you have read the first two parts of this Tech power has gone bully-boy series. Anything from that innocent-seeming app software you know as the icon you click on to get straight into your bank account; or the one from the idealistic literary magazine capable of retrieving an archived essay in a flash; or another downloaded when you failed to resist the siren smile of the double-tailed Starbucks mermaid. 

Here is Stuart Russell — an Atlantic-hopping British computer scientist and founder of Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence — pronouncing on apps in the BBC’s most prestigious lecture series at the end of 2021:

If you take your phone out and look at it, there are 50 or a hundred corporate representatives sitting in your pocket busily sucking out as much money and knowledge and data as they can. None of the things on your phone really represent your interests at all. 

What should happen is that there’s one app on your phone that represents you that negotiates with the information suppliers, and the travel agencies and whatever else, on your behalf, only giving the information that’s absolutely necessary and even insisting that the information be given back, that transactions be completely oblivious, that the other party retains no record whatsoever of the transaction, whether it’s a search engine query or a purchase or anything else.

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You might think it strange that, as far as I can tell, no newspaper has so far quoted Professor Russell’s silver bullet suggestion in a high-profile public lecture until … oh, wait … most newspapers are also in the business of collecting data about you nonstop, aren’t they? You could also wonder, should news media that decline to publicise alerts by eminent scientists about data-gathering systems being feeds for early AI recuse themselves from covering the subject of machine intelligence? 

Should they hand the task over to honest scholars with a gift for communication? — because old, venerated media brands are clearly profiting from peddling data, ’the oil of the 21st century,’ and almost certainly ‘sharing’ with the search engine giants information they gather about their readers from website cookies and apps?

But there are no regulations to stop them from doing this, yet — or, barring the odd high-profile case in which EU authorities slap some Big Tech colossus with a billion-dollar fine — effective enforcement where they do exist. Here is a Financial Times reader’s depressingly accurate statistical perspective on why regulation is too far behind technological advances to protect us from AI harms, including intrusive data collection for training its algorithms: 

@Draco Malfoy The technology behind Artificial Intelligence is understood by such a tiny number of humans globally, probably a few tens of thousands are genuine experts in the field, out of what 7 billion, or is it 8 now?And yet a few thousand non-technical bureaucrats representing hundreds of millions or billions of people are tasking themselves with regulating it. … AI … [is] … already ridiculously good and only getting better.

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An unnerving obstacle to finding a way out of the dilemma is this: the demographic segment best informed and most anxious about the link between data collection and dark visions of future AI feels powerless. Members of it may be more suspicious of apps and more likely to resist installing them than their elders, but are largely passive — so far.  

On the Stanford University campus in early March I fell into a lively debate with two inquisitive, endearing Gen Z-ers who were adamant that any defence against command-and-control tech power would be taken apart by governments and corporations. Gesturing at his companion as he summed up their joint conclusion, one of them sighed, ‘Like he said, capitalism is the problem. Too much money is at stake — from exploiting this technology.’ Their gentle dejection lent them an air indistinguishable from anti-materialistic Hobbits reminding me that even their revered ancestors Bilbo and Frodo had experienced the corrupting pull of the ring of Sauron.

‘But you’re not going to give up without a fight, are you? After all, this technology is shaping what will be your world for far longer than mine.’

Their smiles as they gazed back at me were as sceptical as they were indulgent. They said that they would keep thinking about what might be done. In the months since then, I have had virtually identical exchanges with their contemporaries elsewhere. 

I have also stumbled on a confirmation of my impressions of them in Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age (2021), a collaboration between four scholars working in the UK and US. 

‘[A]dvances in technology scare me because they’re tied to corruption, power, like inappropriate uses of dominance,’ said one interviewee for the book. Technology is described as ‘a monster god on the horizon running towards us’ on the web site of Tim Urban, a writer popular with this group, the authors note. They report that Gen Z-ers ‘are often … deeply pessimistic about the problems they have inherited’ and ‘have a sense of diminished agency,’ because ‘institutions and political and economic systems seem locked, inaccessible to them.’ 

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I have been puzzling over the contrast across time between their defeatism and the gung ho sang-froid of boy soldiers in Britain in World War I. In our information-soaked century, perhaps our teenagers and youngest adults are too well-educated about obstacles to making a difference to bear any resemblance to the twelve- and thirteen-year-old enlistees who lied about being over eighteen to serve, answering feverish recruitment appeals by government leaders. But the under-age signups slowed noticeably once news of the hellish deprivations and misery of fighting from muddy, sodden trenches in the bloodbath got home, despite the national mood of ‘almost hysterical patriotism.’

A combination of conflicts of interest related to investment opportunities in AI; international competition for tech dominance; and plain ignorance means that there are no calls to action from Gen Z’s elders. Nor are their any from their own tribe, as far as I can tell, because they are apt to be leaderless, preferring engagement ‘in a distinctively non-hierarchical, collaborative manner,’ — another independent observation of mine supported by Gen Z, Explained.

Nor is there the blanket media coverage you might hope for of the insults to any notion of privacy or safety in the data collection grinding on and on. Hardly any other media organs followed the online Daily Mail’s example in following the scoop that grew out of a fine investigation by the UK’s Observer — a report on 28 May that twenty regional National Health Service (NHS) websites had for years been using a ‘covert tracking tool’ of Meta/Facebook, through which they passed on to the social media giant ‘private details of web browsing’ by citizens. Data sucked up by what is arguably the least trusted bully-boy corporation — from the databases of the one organisation that has ranked repeatedly in first or second place in opinion polls about trusted British institutions — included …

granular details of pages viewed, buttons clicked and keywords searched. [ These are ] matched to the user’s IP address — an identifier linked to an individual or household — and in many cases details of their Facebook account.

Nor, considering its implications, has there been remotely like enough attention paid to the US Federal Trade Commission’s announcement on 31 May that it had punished Amazon with a $25 million fine, the amount agreed in a settlement of the FTC’s complaint alleging that ‘Amazon prevented parents from exercising their [data] deletion rights … kept sensitive voice and geolocation data for years, and used it for its own purposes, while putting data at risk of harm from unnecessary access.’

Another FTC settlement announcement on the same day imposed an effective penalty of $5.8 million on the online retailer for spying on women — by employees of its Ring subsidiary — in bedrooms and bathrooms, and ‘for failing to prevent hackers from commandeering the devices.’

Such, such, are the joys of misused tech power.

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Celebrated brainboxes, the likes of the ‘AI godfather’ Geoffrey Hinton and Elon Musk, can surely do a bit more than make speeches you could easily take for techies doing their best to out-gloom biblical end-times pronouncements ( ‘ … an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth …’). 

Even as they call for urgent AI regulation, they know that we do not have a fraction of the rule-makers and enforcers we need to make AI development safe.

Why is no one asking them what they propose for alternative technological brakes, or sleeping policemen?  

Tech power has gone bully-boy, part 2: as they shove apps, QR codes and their spying tool siblings onto us, why are the technologically unskilled more thuggish than tech insiders?

. Big Data collection, Coercive early AI, Commercial surveillance, Take Back Your Data movement . , , , , , , , , , ,

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About these images: see part 1 on this topic — in which a top-ranking AI researcher took a question from the daughter of a former Chief Rabbi of Britain about whether we are powerless against coercive AI 

Is the chick wondering whether RSPB.org knows that the QR code in its call for participants in a wildlife survey could be hijacked, diverted and deployed for human tracking-and-profiling?

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[ Part 1 is here. ]

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Discovering that the youngest of us treat apps like a digital pox, presumably because they pay more attention than their Generation X and Boomer parents do to the use of apps as spying and profiling tools will, after a second’s pause, surprise no one. Decades have passed since grownups turned their bright teenagers into family tech support departments.

Checking on this site’s indexing by search engines by typing in the header of my last post, I was pleased to find Bing persistently showcasing, for a virtual companion, a two year-old article on the Forbes site: ‘91% Of Us Hate Being Forced To Install Apps To Do Business, Costing Brands Billions’. This section of it was reassuring about the newest generation of adults:

[T]he younger we are, the more likely we are to give a brand the middle finger for requiring an app install. 87.1% of people from 18-24 have abandoned purchases for being required to install an app, compared to just under 70% for people in the 55 and over age category. 

“77.9% of mobile phone users say the mandatory app installation roadblock caused them to abandon at least one transaction in the last year […] Younger users are progressively more likely to abandon transactions if required to install an app to make a purchase, complete a sale or try a service.”

Perhaps: older people feel “that’s just how they do business,” whereas younger people are aware that services can be delivered over the web as well … and that apps have privacy implications.

… One good thing about apps being required for purchase?

It’s saving consumers billions of dollars.

30% of us saved over $100 in the last year because we stopped a purchase decision that required an app. Another 30% saved between $20 and $100. And almost 8% saved over $500, according to Heady.io.

Older people are still running most influential institutions — anything from the companies pressing us hardest to install their apps to idealistic non-profit organisations. But age alone is not a reliable guide to whether someone has correctly weighed the pros and cons of tracking and data-gathering software. Perhaps Amir Khan, an M.D. and president since last October of Britain’s RSPB.org  — Royal Society for the Protection of Birds — knows that using the QR code included in a print notice of this week’s crowd-sourced species count could put the privacy and security of participants at risk. But — perhaps he doesn’t.  

Judging by search results, no other high-profile mainstream publication is as enlightening about seemingly innocuous tracking tools as Forbes, which has a 55 year-old editor, Randall Lane. This is especially remarkable for anyone who remembers that for years, the magazine’s slogan was ‘The Capitalist’s Tool’. Media coverage of data collection and reselling is full of surprises. One newspaper on which many of us cosmopolites fondly imagined we could depend for protection from capitalist excess used to run excellent reports on commercial tracking and profiling, but stopped doing that without any announcement or explanation. It also appears to be an unrepentant hawker of personal facts about its readers. 

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Tech power has gone bully-boy since its spread beyond Big Tech and Silicon Valley to traditional enterprises. For the fightback, we want a super-app that puts our choices first

. Big Data collection, Coercive early AI, Commercial surveillance, Take Back Your Data movement . , , , , , , , , , , ,

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Coercive early, everyday AI is forcing us to install apps and submit to privacy-smashing data collection by organisations of all kinds. It’s the ugly face of endearing, emotionally attentive AI and charming ChatGPT

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[ Part 2 is here. ]



Above, left. Ravishing, subliminal magnetisation: Google/YouTube algorithms link a follow-on recommendation from a search for a fragment of Vivaldi to a powerful 18th-century portrait of a young English prioress in a French convent

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Above. Through their shadowy data-gathering, data brokers in a low-profile $200 billion-plus industry are rapidly filling in outlines of our identities and lives

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Can there be light at this disturbing tunnel’s end? Maybe.

An underpublicised idea floated by a computer scientist of the underpopulated Yoda class offers a speck of hope — countering this site’s gloom about companies tracking, collecting deeply personal data about, and profiling us. 

As noted already, their methods have sped up our descent into George Orwell’s hell-on-earth since they began to be aped and exchanged by political operatives as far apart as India and the U.S., for deployment in campaigns in national elections — and the essential facts about them have been laid out not by hallucinating conspiracy theorists but in the MIT Technology Review.  

I will get to that promising idea — eventually. First I must explain why you could call the need to fight back against the destruction of our privacy and freedoms desperate, with no fear of exaggeration.

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THE SLIPPERY OPERATORS BEHIND ‘GET THE APP!’ DEMANDS

Let me introduce you to the Digital Dirty Tricks (DDT) department that now exists, in some form, in virtually all companies and nearly all organisations, and which — in an unregulated sphere — is forcibly compelling customers and any site users to do exactly what it wants us to. Congratulate yourself if you are guessing that its coercion specialists are, in effect, Big Tech mimics. The ugly face of the digital revolution has taken us from being unsuspecting dupes of corporate surveillance of all sorts — not just by Silicon Valley enterprises — to puppets bamboozled or bullied past any wish to resist submission to monitoring, data-siphoning, and profiling through special (application or ‘app’) programming. 

You might not recognise the DDT tech invertebrates for what they are.

(**see About )

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